The Old People

Classes started this past Monday and things have been pretty busy/exhausting since then. The hills in Rome are seriously the biggest hills ever. Everywhere I feel like I'm walking up West Brightview to Provost. AUR sits at the top of this huge hill and the buses are pretty unreliable because they always go on strike and they run on Italian time which is whenever they want pretty much. So most of the time we walk. But everyone in Italy walks all the time, even the old people and they actually amaze me. Everyday I see tons of old Italian men and little old ladies walking (the women in their nice Italian leather heels of course) and I think they easily have to be seventy some years old and walking everywhere. When the old people aren't walking they're taking public transportation and they get on the bus and fight the crowd with their roll behind suit cases that have groceries in them because everyone buys groceries fresh daily here. It's really something to see because when I'm seventy some years old I don't exactly imagine myself walking to Caste Village everyday.There's a little old lady that lives in our building that I see on occasion and once my Italian is good enough I'm definitely going to become her friend and talk to her about how she walks everywhere! But I still need a couple more Italian classes before I do that.
This week has been great, I like all my classes at school so far but my Art class is definitely my favorite. We had class in a classroom this first week but for the rest of the semester we are "on-site" meaning that we get to go to a lot of the museums, parks and piazza's around Roma (and for free!). My Italian class is pretty cool too and I have already learned a lot of everyday language that I used at the grocery store today which is pretty cool. I am really going to work at learning the language because the locals are friendly and I want to be able to talk to them by the end of the semester. I am getting adjusted to life here and am starting to get into the swing of school after getting some of my books and some notebooks but the best part about this week was that we figured out how to make our heat work! It's been freezing in the apartment and only one of the radiators worked and had called about it last week. Maintenance came and the nice Italian man said he fixed everything but we were still freezing. We decided just to suck it up and deal with it (since the heat is only on for two hours a day anyways we decided we would just give up) but then today one of the girls figured out that there was a secret switch to turning them on! Which is great news for this weekend since its still supposed to be a little chilly. Its going to reach sixty next week though so I hope we don't need the heat for long. Hope you all have an amazing weekend and LET'S GO STEELERS!